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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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This
fall, the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University of
New Orleans, where I teach, will add a non-fiction track to its current
concentrations in fiction writing, poetry writing, screenwriting and play-writing.
In so doing, we join a nation-wide trend toward recognizing non-fiction as an
equal member in the brotherhood of the narrative arts. In the September, 2000,
issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Old Dominion University Professor Michael
Pearson argues the case for non-fiction in an article titled "The Other
Creative Writing." "Does it make a difference," Pearson asks rhetorically,
"if we make our stories out of facts or fictions any more than it matters
if a sculptor makes a statue out of marble or clay?" In significant part,
the nation's creative writing programs are moving to recognize the increasing
dominance in book sales of non-fiction titles over works of fiction. But if
non-fiction is finally being given its artistic due in the print medium, the
same is hardly true of the film medium where the documentary continues to be a
step-child and the most talented American documentarian, a true practitioner of
"creative non-fiction" is routinely snubbed by Academy Award judges.

I am
talking about University of Wisconsin history major and Berkeley philosophy
student Errol Morris who, over the last two decades, has made the most
arresting documentaries in world cinema, yet has found only a small audience
and only a smidgen of the acclaim he deserves. In a genre dominated by films
about historical and social issues, Morris has chosen to tell different fact-based
stories in strikingly different ways. His first film, Gates of Heaven (1978)
looked at the owners and patrons of a Southern California pet cemetery. His
second, Vernon, Florida(1981), looked at the eccentric
residents of a small town. Morris finally garnered a bit of attention
with The Thin Blue Line in 1988, a film so powerful and convincing that
it resulted in the freeing of a man convicted of a murder he didn't commit.
Oscar judges, though, were said to dismiss the film because it employed sequences
of dramatization, despite the fact that these sequences were staged in a way to
make their emphatic re-creation altogether obvious. Morris attracted somewhat
less attention in 1992 with A Brief History of Time, his biography of
ground-breaking cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Since then he has all but fallen
from view once more, despite directing two more mesmerizing documentary
features. This essay will strive to explore Morris' distinctive oeuvre by
looking closely at his best known work and his two most recent.

American
Justice on Trial

One
of the formative moments of my baby-boomer youth occurred when Perry Mason requested
permission in his weekly murder trial to be allowed an unusual procedure. The
judge was perplexed and undecided and turned for comment to prosecuting
attorney Hamilton Burger. Burger suggested that Mason be allowed to proceed,
remarking that the object of a murder trial, after all, was truth, that its
goal was not victory, but justice. In my memory, this hap­pened more than
once—almost weekly, I recall, though no doubt incorrectly. Whatever, Burger's response,
whether once or repeatedly, had a profound effect on me. It made me fiercely
proud of an element in American democracy that made us distinctive as a people,
but one I ultimately discovered that resided in the sepia-toned world of ideal
rather than the stark and glaring world of reality.

In
the forty years since that particular episode of "Perry Mason"
blinked off the tube, I have, I hope, waxed more sophisticated in my grasp of
the complexities of American criminal justice. But no level of creeping
cynicism, I think, could prepare any first-time viewer for the withering attack
on our justice system waged by Morris in The Thin Blue Line, which
proves that a convicted murderer, still serving a life prison sentence at the
time of the film's release, was innocent beyond the shadow of a doubt. In so
doing the film impugns the intelligence of the police officers who investigated
the crime, the motives of the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the
case, and the worthiness to sit on the bench of the man who heard the case as judge.
In the final analysis, the movie calls into question just how often our
adversarial system results in such horrifying miscarriages of justice.

The
details of the murder case in The Thin Blue Line are these: Shortly
after midnight on November 29, 1976, a Dallas policeman named Robert Wood
stopped a blue compact automo­bile for driving without lights. As his partner waited
in the police car, Wood approached the violating vehicle. He planned to issue a
verbal warning and send the driver on his way. But when he stepped alongside
the window, a series of shots rang out. The fatal rounds were fired into
Officer Wood's head after he had already fallen to the ground. The small blue
car then sped away into the cold fall night.

Officer
Theresa Turko, Woods' partner, did not manage to get the license plate number.
But she did offer the observation that the driver was alone in his car and was
wearing a jacket with a large fleecy collar. Beyond that, the Dallas police were
able to generate very little to go on. On December 3, 1976, after notices of a
$20,000 cash reward appeared in Dallas newspapers, a woman named Emily Miller
came forward and filed a written affidavit claiming that she'd passed the crime
scene moments before the shooting. The driver of the blue compact, she said,
was "a light-skinned Negro or a Mexican."

Dallas police spent thousands of man hours studying
automobile tire tracks and examining auto registration records for Chevy Vegas
(the make of the car identified by officer Turko). But by the third week of
December they were still without substantive leads and admit in the film to a
feeling of public humiliation. Never before in the department's history had
they failed to apprehend a cop killer within forty-eight hours. The
break in the case came on December 19, 1976, and came from a most unexpected quarter.
Three hundred fifty miles from Dallas, in the small town of Vidor on the Texas-Louisiana
border, local authorities arrested six­teen-year-old David Harris for a crime
spree in early December of that year. In the process of their investigation,
Vidor police ascertained that Harris had recently stolen a blue Mercury Comet
and a .22 caliber pistol and used the latter while committing several
burglaries and an armed robbery. Furthermore, friends of Harris told
investigators that for nearly a month Harris had bragged of having "offed
a pig in Dallas." Led by Harris' vidor police retrieved the .22 revolver
from a nearby swamp, and it proved the weapon with which Officer Wood was murdered.

When
interrogated by Dallas police, how­ever, Harris maintained that he was
innocent. His story of killing Wood was told to "impress his friends."
The actual shooting, Harris now asserted, was committed by a twenty-eight-year-old
Caucasian laborer named Randall Adams, a hitchhiker Harris had picked up in Dallas on the day of the killing. Harris claimed to have wit­nessed the murder from the front
seat of the stolen Comet, which, he said, Adams was dri­ving. He did not report
the crime because the (stolen) murder weapon was his. Randall Adams had no
prior record, but on December 21, relying on Harris, testimony, Dallas officials arrested him and charged him with the murder of Officer Wood.

During
his interrogation, Adams admitted that he had been given a ride by Harris on
the morning of November 28, 1976, and that the two had spent a large portion of
the day together driving around Dallas. In the early evening the two of them
had purchased beer and attended a drive-in screening of two teenage sex flicks.
According to Adams, though, they departed the drive-in around 9:30 p.m., and Adams arrived back at the Comfort Motel where he was residing in time for the end of the
"Carol Burnett Show" and the beginning of the "Ten O'Clock
News." Adams claimed that by the time Officer Wood was murdered he had
been asleep for two hours. The Dallas police, however, chose to believe Harris'
account, and Adams was bound over for trial.

The
court proceedings began on April 26, 1977. Adams was prosecuted by Douglas
Mulder, an assistant district attorney with an undefeated record and an
astonishing reputation for convincing juries to return recommendations for the
death penalty. The defense attorneys were Edith James, who had never before
worked a case involving a capital felony, and Dennis White, whose speciality
was real estate. At the trial, Harris repeated his accusations against Adams. The defense attempted to impeach Harris' testimony by referring to his Vidor crime spree
and his statements to associates that it was he who had killed Wood. Judge Don
Metcalfe disallowed such rebuttal, however, ruling that Harris' statements and
activities after the murder were not relevant to the issue of Adams' guilt or
innocence. Officer Turko testified that Adams' bushy hair probably looked like
the fleecy jacket collar she had described earlier.

Still,
going into the last day of the trial, defense counsels White and James thought
that they were surely going to win, that the state had not proved its case. But
when they arrived in court on the fateful Friday, April 29, 1977, Mulder
produced three surprise witnesses, all of whom identified Adams as the driver
of the blue compact. The most damaging witness was Emily Miller, who
dramatically named Adams and fur­ther claimed that she had picked him out of a police
lineup. Shaken and confused, White and James made critical errors at this
point. Namely, they did not confront Miller with her earlier statement that the
driver was "either a Negro or a Mexican." Nor did they reserve the
right to recall her and the other witnesses at a later date. The trial recessed
for the weekend with the defense case in tatters.

And
it got worse the next Monday. Defense had now prepared a strategy for
impeaching Miller in particular. But she was not in the court­room. And
prosecutor Mulder informed the judge that she had been dismissed and had subsequently
disappeared. In her absence White requested permission to show the jury
Miller's statement from December 3, 1976, but Judge Metcalfe refused, stating
that since Miller was unavailable to defend herself against the impeachment,
such a procedure would be unfair.

In his
closing remarks to the jury, Dennis White argued that David Harris was easily
the most likely killer, that both the car and the weapon were his, that he had
a long record, and that at the time of the shooting he was in the midst of a
crime spree. Furthermore, White submitted, the primary case against Adams derived from Harris, evidently self-interested accusations. Speaking last, though,
D.A. Mulder stressed the final day's testimony from Miller and the two others.
In an eloquent closing Mulder spoke of Officer Wood, his widow and family, and
of all courageous policemen as a "thin blue line" who protect
civilization from the omnipresent threat of anarchy. "But who protects the
police officer?" he asked. "Who picks up their banner when they fall
in battle?" Judge Metcalf recalls to this day how moved he was by Mulder's
summation. And a stirred jury returned both a guilty verdict and a recommen­dation
for the electric chair.

The
Thin Blue Line takes us through the years
after the verdict, through Randall Adams' repeated appeals, through his stay of
execution by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell three days before he was
to die in 1979 and through the 1980 commutation of his sentence to life
imprisonment by Texas Governor William Clements, a move that denied Adams a
retrial on the facts of the case. It also takes us through the subsequent years
in the life of David Harris, through his enlistment in the U.S. Army and sub­sequent
arrest by military police in 1978, through his 1979 apprehension and 1980 con­viction
for a California crime spree that included attempted murder of a police officer
and his efforts at trial to blame the incident on a hitch­hiker, through his
arrest for attempted rape, through his arrest and conviction for the murder of
a man he first wounded in a gun battle and then dispatched with three
deliberate shots to the head. And much more. Morris produces evi­dence that
Miller and the other surprise wit­nesses lied, that Harris was carefully
coached by the prosecution and that D.A. Mulder deliber­ately withheld and
misrepresented evidence.

Why?
Because Dallas was crying for vengeance. Because David Harris was only six­teen
and could not be tried as an adult and could not be given the death penalty.
Because Randall Adams was twenty-eight and could. Because assistant district
attorney Mulder had a perfect trial record and couldn't bear to lose. And because
as Mulder told one of his friends who reported the incident to Morris, "It
takes a skilled prosecutor to convict even a guilty defen­dant, but it takes a
great prosecutor to convict one who's innocent." The Thin Blue Line is
a daring and gripping piece of cinema, easily as involving as the tautest fictional
thriller. Anyone who has ever contem­plated the merits of capital punishment
should see this film before adopting a final stance. Randall Adams was finally
released from prison, but only because Morris had the fortitude and artistry to
make such an overwhelmingly con­vincing motion picture. When I first saw the
film in the late 1980s, Adams was still in jail, and even today I recall how
sick at heart the film made me, sick that a country as great as ours can steal
over a decade of an innocent man's life. In recent days, of course, DNA testing
has shown that the case of Randall Adams was no isolated aberration but a
single instance in a wide pattern. The Thin Blue Line suggested as much
years before biotechnology advanced to solve the scores of cases Errol Morris
couldn't.

Splendor
of the Human Spirit

Morris
described his 1997 film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control as "the
ultimate low-concept movie—a film that utterly resists the possibility of a
one-line summary." He's right. But I can say something brief in judgment
of his picture: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is the most unusual
movie I've ever seen and one of the most fascinating. It's a picture which
makes the viewer squirm with pleasure while in the the­ater and provides fuel
for conversation for days afterwards.

Like
Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida, the 1997 film
eschews the usual documentary strategy of trying to chronicle an event or
explore an issue. Focusing locally to contem­plate globally, Fast, Cheap
& Out of Control is a reverential meditation which endeavors to
"document" the variety and splendor of the human spirit. The picture
works this way: It intercuts interviews with four men who don't know each
other, with scenes of the men at work and with old B-movie footage and
cartoons. Odd? You bet. Involving? You bet!

Dave
Hoover is a wild animal trainer and circus performer who idolizes the late
action-movie and serial star Clyde Beatty (some of whose work is also
included). Dave works mostly with lions and tigers but has sweeping theories
about animal psychology, all formed from his extensive interaction with wild
beasts. George Mendonca is a topiary gardener who uses old-fashioned pruning
shears to shape hedges and trees into bears, giraffes, elephants and
other creatures. Ray Mendez is an expert on the fairly recently discovered
hairless mole-rats, tiny beaver-faced mammals who organize them­selves in nests
that most resemble insect hives. And Rodney Brooks is an M.I.T. engineer who has
designed some of the world's most complicated autonomous robots.

As
the picture rapidly introduces us to each of these men, we sit wrinkle-browed
trying to figure out what in the world they have in common. Gradually we
understand. Each of their lives is somehow connected to animals. Mendonca makes
animal shapes out of plants. Hoover trains and performs with animals. Mendez
studies a specific species of animal, a mammal that acts like an insect. And
Brooks achieved his breakthrough in robotics by studying insect motion. Based
on his under­standing of insects, he designs machines to do for man what man
once might have employed draft animals to do.

In
addition, these four men share a rever­ence for the animal kingdom. Mendonca's
art is always expressed in the shape of animals. Mendez could clearly spend all
his waking hours watching the activities and charting the social relations of
his beloved mole-rats. Brooks has discovered that the key to complicated human development
lies in understanding the simplest of Earth's creatures. And Hoover
passionately believes in demonstrable animal intelligence, individual
personality, memory and will.

The
four have other things in common as well. They each possess an unbridled
enthusiasm for their work. We are nowhere told how much money any of these men
make, and we aren't because it doesn't matter. The M.I.T. engineer may make
quite a lot, and the topiary gardener may make very little. But neither man
would begin to measure the product of his life's endeavor by the size of his
paycheck. In fact, it's altogether obvious that measurement is of absolutely no
concern to any of these men. They do what they do because they are enraptured
by doing it. The value of their efforts to the human race as a whole arguably
varies. Brooks' work may produce countless advantages for us all. But Hoover is
just an entertainer and one, at that, who admits wild animal acts like his will
prob­ably not last another generation. The works of a sculptor or painter can
be preserved in museums for millennia, but Mendonca suspects that his topiary
garden will die along with him. And Mendez's study of mole-rats might be
dismissed as a mere scientific curiosity. Still, whatever its socially
sanctioned "value," Brooks' work ethic stems from his boundless
fascination, not from his sense of altruistic mission. And none of the others
is for an instant troubled by the seeming impracticality of that which he does.
Too, Brooks might be the first to find unsuspected value in what the others do.
Look what he learned from insects.

In
the final analysis, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a rumination on
evolution, from insects to mammals that act like insects to great beasts to man
who can create objects which act like animals. And here it is Brooks who
proposes that robots may represent the next step in the evolutionary process.
Robotics scientists are very close to designing machines with levels of intelligence
equal to and greater than that of human beings. It will not prove hard at all
to produce machines that can reproduce themselves. Brooks admits once machines
with high levels of intelligence have been made opera­tional that they may well
prove alien to us in the way that we may seem alien to the "lower"
crea­tures with whom we share the planet. And intel­ligent machines may well
prove hardier than human beings. A variety of disasters could wipe out, as
Brooks puts it, "flesh-based life." In that case the machines we call
robots may survive us, may endure when we expire, may be our legacy for a
future very different from our own time.

Morris'
title refers to Brooks' robots, but it's also a humble joke about his own work.
In this he is way overly modest. However fast and cheap this movie may be, its
control is astonishing. I have only scratched the surface of its treasures.
The picture can be described little easier in a thousand words than in a single
sen­tence. Watch this film with your children. And say a prayer that each of
your children finds a calling in life as passionate as that of Dave Hoover,
George Mendonca, Ray Mendez or Rodney Brooks—and, I might add, Errol Morris.
Only someone who loved his craft would make a picture like this and could make
it so compelling.

The
Ordinary Face of Evil

In his
typically arresting latest documen­tary, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of
Fred A. Leuchter,Jr. (1999), Morris addresses a question historians have
wrestled with for more than half a century: How could the Holocaust happen in an
ostensibly Christian country where people went to church and read a Bible that
taught, "Love thy neighbor as thyself"? Even where acknowledged
prejudice is factored in, how could God-fearing people turn their faces away as
their co-workers, former schoolmates and fellow citizens were rounded up,
forced into squalid concentration camps and ultimately murdered by the
millions? Though we hardly have to look any further than recent events in Serbia and Kosovo to see how ethnic hatreds translate into unspeakable violence, the
answers to questions about the Holocaust are nonethe­less nowhere clear and
everywhere sad. The murder of six million Jews didn't happen in the hot rain of
machine-gun fire, wasn't the product of renegade soldiers settling ancient
grudges in a frenzy of killing. The Holocaust was organized and cold,
perpetrated not by street toughs but by doctors and accountants. Nazi true
believers dropped the gas pellets, but an entire nation col­laborated. They did
so by willing themselves not to know what evil surrounded them. We see this willful
ignorance still struggling to survive today among right-wing conspiracy
theorists who cling to the straws of sophistry and lie in order to maintain
that the Holocaust, in fact, never happened.

One
such individual is a Maiden, Massa­chusetts, engineer named Fred A. Leuchter,
Jr. A slight, balding and nerdy man, Leuchter is living proof of the old saw
that "a little education is a dangerous thing." By the mid-1980s,
Leuchter had taken his degree in engineering and devel­oped a business for
himself as an expert on instruments of execution. As state after state rushed
to reinstate capital punishment after Gary Gilmore's 1977 death by firing squad
in Utah, Leuchter began to build or refurbish a number of death machines, including
lethal injection appliances, electric chairs and gas chambers. In a
particularly morbid assignment from the state of Tennessee, Leuchter was hired to
construct an electric chair using wood from the state's disassembled gallows.
Recalling this period, Leuchter looks into Morris' camera and declares his
interests in execution devices to be purely humanitarian. He wants to help the
con­demned die quickly and with as little pain as pos­sible. Leuchter is so
mild and innocent looking, we might believe him if he didn't rush on to describe with
discomfiting relish the flaming heads of botched electrocutions and the spewing
bodily fluids of those who have been executed too slowly and with too much
pain.

By
the late 1980s, Leuchter's grim exper­tise had attracted such notoriety that
ultimately he became the subject of feature articles in The Atlantic Monthly
and The New York Times. And then in 1988, his life took a sudden,
distressing and finally disastrous turn. At the time, a neo-Nazi named Ernst
Zundel was being prosecuted under Canadian anti-hate-crime legislation for publishing
two books that denied the Holocaust ever took place: Did Six Million Really
Die? and The Hitler We Loved and Why. Forced by legal procedure to
prove his allegations true, Zundel hired Leuchter as an expert on gas chambers
to investigate the death compounds at Auschwitz and Birkenau. What Leuchter
thought he was up to at the outset is unclear, but his actions might be deemed
laughable if they hadn't produced such outrageous results.

With
a film crew hired by Zundel docu­menting his "research," Leuchter
traveled to the Polish killing grounds and scrambled over the ruins of the old
concentration camps. At the sites of the gas chambers, Leuchter inspected door­ways
and vents and repeatedly chiseled chips of bricks and mortar from walls,
ceilings and floors. He had no authority to do this, of course, as he readily
admits, and from what we see he was hardly systematic about labeling his
"samples," which he sweeps into plastic bags and stuffs
surreptitiously into his pockets, glancing around in obvious concern that he
might at any minute be arrested. He even relates for Morris his wrapping the
"samples" in his dirty laundry so they wouldn't be discovered by
police and confides his plans to have made a run for the border if anyone got
wind of what he was up to. Leuchter obviously doesn't see these statements as
confessions of anything other than the stress under which he worked. But they
just as obvi­ously suggest to the viewer that the death engi­neer brought a
clear agenda to his research.

Back
in the U.S., Leuchter had his samples "blind tested" by a chemical
firm. And when the tests found no significant traces of cyanide, Leuchter
declared that no one was killed with poison gas at either Auschwitz or
Birkenau. In his infamous The Leuchter Report, he went on to argue that
the rooms he investigated in Poland could not conceivably have been gas
chambers because their doorways lacked adequate seals and exhaust vents.
Leuchter tried to enter his report as exculpatory evidence at Zundel's
hate-crime trial, but the judge would not allow it.

Morris
produces witnesses who illustrate why. James Roth, the chemist who did
Leuchter's lab work, explains that residual cyanide would have penetrated into
surrounding surfaces a tiny faction of the thickness of a human hair.
Leuchter's "samples" were inches thick. With no instructions about
what they were looking for or why, Roth's lab pulverized the brick and mortar
chips and tested for cyanide. The process was like looking for a traceable drop
of human spit in an oil tanker full of Mississippi River water.

Historian
Robert Jan Van Pelt points out other flaws in Leuchter's clandestine and hasty "research."
The compounds at Auschwitz and Birkenau are badly deteriorated. Building mate­rials
from both sites were scavenged by area residents for rebuilding shattered
homes and busi­ness in the aftermath of the war. So the current absence of door
seals and exhaust vents proves only that a lot of time has passed. Moreover,
lacking any knowledge of German and employing no translator, Leuchter examined
no historical records. Van Pelt shows Morris signed and dated camp documents
referring to gas chambers and placing orders for cyanide pellets. Morris
doesn't even bother to produce the testimony of camp survivors who know first
hand that their loved ones were taken from them and murdered.

But
to this day, Leuchter remains uncon­vinced by the devastating rebuttals to his
own "evidence." If Auschwitz and Birkenau were slave labor camps, he
argues, why kill those who must do your bidding? In asking such a question, of
course, he ignores a series of historical facts. First, the Nazis
systematically killed the old, the very young, the weak and the sick. They then
starved those they didn't kill immediately until their victims fell into one of
the latter two cate­gories. Moreover, Leuchter's argument ignores the fact that
the majority of the killing took place in the last months of the war, an orgy
of cynically concealed, cold-blooded murder designed at once to cover up
earlier atrocities and to leave the Final Solution as Hitler's enduring legacy.
But why kill the Jews with gas? Leuchter asks. Bullets would be faster and
cheaper. The answer lies in history that men like Fred Leuchter strive to subvert. As
James Moll's Oscar-winning documentary The Last Days points out,
Hitler's army lurched into Hungary in 1944 for no observable military purpose
and busied them­selves almost exclusively with arresting Jews. While the allies
made preparations for D-Day, Hitler pulled thousands and thousands of troops away
from critical strategic assignment in the west to a dragnet for persecution in
the east. Why did the Nazis do what they did? Because they were mad men and
monsters. And because people like Fred Leuchter let them get away with it then
and deny they did it now.

Some
hoped that Morris would finally land an Oscar nomination with Mr. Death because
he had finally addressed, however oddly and even obliquely, a significant historical
issue of the sort that the Academy Awards has liked to honor. But once again
Morris was passed over. And he was, I think, because his depiction of Leuchter
is so subtly humane. Yes, Fred Leuchter emerges as a creep, so insensitive he
took his wife to Auschwitz as their honeymoon. At some level, though, he's a
fool rather than a conventional villain. The lesser artist could easily have
demonized Leuchter, but Morris understands that Leuchter's very ordinariness
makes him all the more frightening. The film ends with Leuchter telling a story
without a trace of irony about how he sat in an electric chair as a youngster
and grew up to defy the superstition that a child who does such a thing ends up
being executed as an adult. This despite the fact that his actions in the Zundel
case cost him his wife and his career and have turned him into a public pariah.
Still, Morris has said that he thinks Leuchter really isn't an anti-Semite, and
though Leuchter has smelted toxically flawed research into poisonous historical
revisionism, he doesn't seem the calculating hater that, for instance, Zundel
does. But
whatever Leuchter's motivations, his denial of history is a willful act of
mental gymnastics and a very dangerous one. The Leuchter Report has sold
millions of copies in a dozen different languages and has become gospel for
countless readers. Always the most imagistic of documentarians, Morris
repeatedly invokes a powerful metaphor in Mr. Death by stylizing Fred Leuchter's
hands and tools as they hammer and chisel at brick and mortar. The walls are
the historical truth. The fragments Leuchter chips away become the evidence of
an elaborate revi­sionist fraud.

In a
sensationalized world obsessed with glamour, Errol Morris is fascinated with
the man so common he is usually invisible. That man, like Randall Adams, is
sometimes innocent. Or, like Fred Leuchter, he is sometimes guilty. He is often
hilariously quirky like the cast of Vernon, Florida or
devastatingly lonely, like the people we meet in Gates of Heaven. Morris
is interested in them all because he has an unsurpassed appreciation for human
individuality.

I
might wish that documentary film achieve the status now being accorded the
non-fiction book. And more specifically, I might wish that Errol Morris find
both the audience and the acclaim that he deserves. But I needn't worry that he
will be long distracted by awards he should have won going to other, lesser
work. For I am confident that Morris makes the films he makes because they are
the films he wants to make. As he perhaps best illustrates in his most thematically
challenging film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, elusive human
happiness is claimed not by recognition or reward but by daring to dance to the
music that plays for you alone.